All episodes of The Jordan Harbinger Show

The Jordan Harbinger Show · 2026-10-01 · 89 min · 17,778 words

1390: Rob Reid | Pandemic Prevention in an Age of Printable Pathogens

Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks. From spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional mafia enforcer, arms dealer, former jihadi, or real life pirate. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show. I suggest our episode starter packs.

These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show, just visit JordanHarbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, what happens when the ability to engineer a pandemic stops requiring a secret Soviet bioweapons lab and starts requiring roughly the same technical sophistication as cheating on your freshman biology homework? Rob Reed is back, and today we're looking at the increasingly uncomfortable marriage between AI and synthetic biology, including how researchers can order pieces of deadly viruses through the mail, why robotic cloud labs could be both revolutionary and terrifying, and how a government program somehow arrived at the brilliant idea of hunting down thousands of undiscovered viruses. identifying the most dangerous ones, and then publishing their genetic blueprints online. The good news, there are surprisingly practical ways to make this much harder from DNA screening and wastewater surveillance to futuristic UV technology that could potentially kill pathogens right out of the air. So you know, light stuff today.

Here we go with Rob Reed. It's funny, we're just talking about how the worst AI is the one you're using today. And I tend to agree because actually I was working on the notes for this episode. And I got this warning. I actually clipped it and saved it on my iPad. This content can't be shown. We take extra caution with requests involving biological research and applications that could pose safety risks.

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